There's no doubt - according to current theories of sexual attraction - that Angelina Jolie-Pitt's career has been at least part-fuelled by the fact that she has that look of fertility we perceive as feminine beauty.

In 2009 she was named, in Vanity Fair, the most beautiful woman in the world. Last year, after her double mastectomy, she came 10th on a similar list. (No woman, of course, ever stays at the top of such a list - age only ever takes her down it.) So perhaps it should be no surprise that when she announced last week that, fearing the threat of cancer, she had weighed up her risk and decided to have her ovaries removed, it was a big story. Media outlets went wild. Some headlines highlighted her surgery; others reported, almost with a triumphalism, that she was "in menopause".

Here was a woman who had forged a career, at least in part, from a sexiness that possessed all the indicators of reproductive health - full lips, large eyes, perfect waist-to-hip ratio - explicitly saying she is no longer fertile.

Credit should be given to Jolie-Pitt. In recent years she has turned her fame to good effect, using it to highlight humanitarian causes. Her recent announcement is a continuation of that. As Megan Garber wrote in The Atlantic, the actor and UNHCR ambassador was taking "an activist approach to over-sharing". Trolls may deride her for being attention-seeking, or, as Katie Hopkins put it, "smug", but clearly, Jolie-Pitt saw that her openness could help others. Through a moving op-ed written in the New York Times, the actor, whose own mother died of cancer aged 56, told the story of how she came to her decision, following a test scare.

There were two messages there. One was for the small number of women who have, because they carry a mutation in the BRCA1 gene, an 87 per cent risk of breast cancer and a 50 per cent risk of ovarian cancer.

The other was for every woman - whatever stage of life they are at - since, if not already menopausal or post-menopausal, they will almost certainly enter this phase, when they stop menstruating and cease producing eggs. She brought attention to the existence of a stage of a woman's life which is almost entirely written out of our culture, and is barely represented in film or the media. Indeed, you would be forgiven for thinking it didn't exist. Such is the pressure on middle-aged women to continue to appear like fertile girls, that high-profile women in this age group often look as if there is still oestrogen youth-serum pumping through their veins.

"I am now in menopause," Jolie-Pitt wrote. "I will not be able to have any more children, and I expect some physical changes. But I feel at ease with whatever will come, not because I am strong but because this is a part of life. It is nothing to be feared."

The fact of Jolie-Pitt's menopause shouldn't be shocking: one-third of the female population, in the UK and USA, are currently in menopause or post-menopause. So it's symptomatic of both our inability as a culture to think of women's existence beyond the end of their reproductive life, and the myth-making and fear-making there has long been around the menopause, that Jolie-Pitt's announcement provoked the reaction that it did. Inevitably there were those who didn't want to hear about it. Some people, mostly men, seemed to feel that they were having rather unappealing "women's issues" thrust down their throats. Often they appeared to think they had heard quite enough of women banging on about the menopause and menstruation.

What's strange about this is that it is at odds with women's actual experience. Mostly, women do feel the menopause is a taboo, rarely talked about. Louise Foxcroft, author of an award-winning history of menopause, Hot Flushes And Cold Science, recalls that she found the book incredibly difficult to publicise. Often when she approached magazines, she was told that it was "not a sexy topic".

"Everybody wanted my book Calories And Corsets [a history of dieting]," she says, "but nobody wanted to touch this one. Because it wasn't sexy. And women primarily must be sexy. That's the general approach to women in the media and films." Even when she was researching the subject, Foxcroft found that people were often "appalled or embarrassed" when she told them what she was working on.

She was not surprised by this. The book came out of her own difficult feelings about the menopause, prompted when, aged 42, a doctor suggested to her that a health complaint might be a symptom of the change of life (in fact, it turned out not to be). She was, she says, "appalled by the very idea of the menopause. I thought it was the end. And then, I thought, 'Why am I thinking that?' And I decided to look into it".

My own experience is that women do talk about the menopause - of course, they do - but the subject is discussed in whispers and around kitchen tables, generally in all-female company. My friends in their early 50s have had a wide range of experiences and feelings about this change. Some are in mourning - particularly those who had no children and wanted them. Some seem to want the whole thing out of the way as quickly as possible and to be rid of those pesky periods. Another seems to have only realised she was menopausal when she finally went to the doctor over some annoying symptom and found that she was 90% through it. "That explains why I was behaving like I was possessed at times," she says.

It is not really that menopause has ever been a total taboo, entirely unspoken of, never examined. The problem is that it has long been talked of, historically mostly by men, in ways that make it more difficult for women to navigate this stage or their lives, and load the transition with fear. The family-planning pioneer Marie Stopes wrote in 1936: "The 'crises' of a woman's life have been much descanted upon by men medical writers [and] perhaps the most artificially created has been her 'change'."

Foxcroft has tracked attitudes towards the menopause back to the Greeks, Romans and beyond, and found it has long been viewed through metaphors of "lack and loss, disease and decay", spoken of as a "gateway to death". Early medical and cultural attitudes were that this was, she says, "the end of a woman's life so she's no longer seen as viable in all sorts of ways. She's no longer desirable. She's no longer seen as important". Even now, the term "menopausal" is often used as an insult or a joke. Only a few weeks ago Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph, was dismissing Jeremy Clarkson as "menopausal".

One of the problems in defining the menopause is that the phenomenon seems different for every woman. As Foxcroft puts it: "The word 'symptoms' can be misleading and it is questionable whether there are any menopausal symptoms besides hot flushes. As the menopause coincides with other experiences of ageing it is all the more difficult to interpret and distinguish."

There are women who sail through the transition, barely noticing much more than the occasional hot flush; others, like actor Julie Walters, find it an insufferable, drawn-out agony. "A lot of post-menopausal women say that they have gained a lot," notes Foxcroft. "They are now free from the fear of pregnancy, from menstruation. There's a real sense of liberation afterwards but you don't really get to hear about that."

Jolie-Pitt's menopause is of a rare type - a forced menopause, triggered by surgical removal of her ovaries. It comes to her young - at 39 years old, an age which is considered "premature menopause". But not so much younger than many others. Though 51 is the average age for women in the UK to naturally hit menopause, its arrival at any age over 40 is considered a normal event, not to be unexpected.

Attitudes to the menopause are changing, but only gradually. There have been, in recent decades, many books written on the subject, including Germaine Greer's The Change: Women, Ageing And The Menopause and Jenni Murray's Is It Me Or Is It Hot In Here?. Greer, interestingly, chose not to use the word "menopause", but the rather more dramatic term, "climacteric". "Only when the stress of the climacteric is over," she wrote, "can the ageing woman realise that autumn can be long, golden, milder and warmer than summer, and is the most productive season of the year ... Only when a woman ceases the fretful struggle to be beautiful can she turn her gaze outward, find the beautiful and feed upon it."

Jolie-Pitt has got us talking about the menopause again - and her statement, coming from such an icon of beauty, has a strong impact. She seems to be saying that the ovaries, long-considered to be a woman's entire worth, are dispensable, not an essential part of her body, and that it is perfectly possible to be feminine without them. "I feel feminine," Jolie wrote last week, "and grounded in the choices I am making for myself and my family." Those words echoed those she wrote in a previous article when she announced her double mastectomy. "I do not feel any less of a woman," she wrote. "I feel empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity."

How we feel about the menopause is part of a wider issue revolving around shame and women's bodies. A similar taboo is attached to menstruation. It is one of the ironies of life that women can spend their fertile years pretending that they don't bleed, eliminating all indications of their cycle, and then, when it's over, they find themselves having to hide the fact that it's over. As Foxcroft points out, this is part of a wider "sociocultural idea of woman as something other and fairly unpleasant". She notes that attached to these biological processes, "there is a sense of humiliation. And women don't want to talk about these things because of that humiliation".

Foxcroft is encouraged by Jolie-Pitt's openness about her surgery and menopause. "The more that it's talked about and the more that it's just another piece in anybody's general life, the more ordinary it is, and the less destructive it is to a person's sense of self-worth, the better." The menopause, we need to remind ourselves, doesn't merit the fear associated with it, since it is not a disease, nor even anything close to a signal of the end of life. Rather, it is a natural and unavoidable event. "It is," Foxcroft notes, "just one more change to negotiate, and nowhere near as astonishing or potentially problematic as pregnancy."

Angelina Jolie-Pitt has excited a new wave of debate. Stories are being swapped, diet and medical tips shared. But one of the truths we must remember is that no medical professional or statistician can tell a woman what her menopause will be like. That journey is personal and unknowable, as all aspects of life are. As Iris Murdoch once put it, in her novel The Good Apprentice: "There is no typical menopause, only as many menopauses as there are women."